phNomming in the Penh: March 2011

After a month of searching for a new place to move into, I finally found a place on gumtree hk!
They are 3 nice ladies and 1 of them was gonna move out and leave the place and hence the other two had to rent out the room that she was taking, and they found me! Yay!

My new place to sleep in

That window, I later found out, was where the previous owner of the house jumped out from.

Just Kidding! Hahah but that window is where all the traffic noises came in at night and it was super annoying I had to keep it closed most of the time.

The other door you see is the shared toilet which Lisa & I shared. Lauren has her own en-suite toilet in her bedroom.

That room at the end is Lauren's Bedroom, twice as big as my mini room!

This is our living room, and they said they saw fireworks from the living room during Chinese New Year.

And thats the main door, with my shoes right next to it.

'Tam Zai' yun nan noodles is a chain noodle shop that is ever popular regardless of age in Hong Kong.
How I got to know about this fabulous gift from the universe, is from my ex colleagues when I was working near Cheung Sha Wan. They used to call up the stall and mass order lunch for everyone, and then we'd walk down to the stall to collect our noodles by ourselves as this chain yunnan noodle shop does not offer delivery services.

It is so popular that it is always crowded (depending on location), and the one I first went to was always full of people lining up, holding numbered tickets waiting for their turn.

It serves a range of about 15 ingredients which you can choose randomly and they'll cook them in your choice of soup base. For people who can't take spicy foods, theres only 1 soup base to choose from, no prizes for guessing what it is, but yes it is Clear Savoury Soup. How boring. =] And there comes the choices for spicy food lovers, and they are Level 10, L5, L4, L3, L2, Mild Spicy, Medium Spicy, Big Spicy and finally SUPER spicy, with L10 being the mildest. Of course there is also the Hot & Sour version which is basically L10+preserved sour vegetables, so it's an option for people who like sour soup bases.

I started out with a L5 spiciness in 2008, and slowly upgraded to L4. They are pretty spicy even for L5 and L4, so I remained in that level, until recently, Sep 2011, I upgraded my spiciness level to a L3 and found myself having to search for tissues to stop the uncontrollable mucus from dripping. Eww, yes I know. It is such an addictive dish that I'm almost certain they must have added in some addictive ingredients that made me wanna have them almost every 3 days. Of course, there are people who do not understand what's so delicious about this bowl of noodles, so I guess the addictive doesn't work on everyone. =]

I always choose 竹生 (pronounced 'chok sang'), which is some kinda porous, crunchy bamboo shoot of some kind, which absorbs all the flavour of the soup and really juicy when you chew on it, paired up with either chicken or pork slices and that meal would be a definite satisfying one.

A bowl of those two ingredients plus the spicy soup base costs around HK$28-$30 (S$4.50-$5) depending on the location of the noodle shop.

So far no other soup noodles that I've tried managed to take over the place of Tam Zai in my heart, or tummy for that matter. Either that, or I've been eating Tam Zai for so long, that I don't even wanna try other similar types of noodles (this type of noodles is totally different from the wanton noodles type nor the prawn mee type btw).

Photo time!